On 12/22/21 12:47, Phil Stracchino wrote:
On 12/22/21 09:03, Neil Balchin wrote:
I’ve been down that road, yes bacula can certainly be configured to
handle that at least on a ’nix system. Before your get too far
though, you should do your own research on the reliability of
spinning disk drives (internal or external). They pale in comparison
to Tape. I would include s.m.a.r.t. disk checks as a regular part of
my schedule and don’t expect to do this in an archiving scenario,
hard drives sitting on a shelf unpowered for in excess of a year have
frightening failure rates.
LTO tapes are meant to let for 30 yrs
Yeah, but the LTO drives are dead in eighteen months unless you have a
filtered environment for them. (That is my personal experience at
least.) I abandoned tape backup because I got tired of replacing the
drives.
My experience as well with tape drives. IMHO, archives must be rotated
onto newer media periodically anyway. I cannot imagine that it will be
possible to find a drive that will read a 30 year old LTO tape. Systems
will likely be able to attach USB drives for many years to come.
I use vchanger to treat USB drives like a magazine full of tapes.
Management, rotation, etc. is basically the same as with tape. It is a
good setup for the small businesses that I work with who will never have
a filtered environment and replacement tape drives, to them, are expensive.
Another factor to consider is that the cost of external SSD drives is
falling. Currently they are about 4x the cost of hard drives, but I feel
that they will soon become a viable option for small business. They are
quite physically durable and are expected to retain data without power
for around 10 years. However, simply plugging them in once a year
recharges the cells and should extend that many times over. In fact, I
am considering suggesting these to use for archival/off-site storage in
conjunction with hard drives.
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